The Bob Jones frame-up is John Kiriakou’s account of an operation he ran against a fellow prisoner at FCI Loretto. The name is a placeholder Kiriakou uses in the retelling.
His framing of the motive is deliberately modest. In the real world, he says, he would not have given the man five seconds of thought — but because they were there together all the time, or at least at every meal, he could not stand it any more, and started asking himself how he was going to deal with him.[1]
The obstacle
The difficulty was structural. The man sat at the Aryan table, which was also Kiriakou’s table, so Kiriakou could not simply accuse him of being a pedophile — an accusation from a tablemate would have been transparent.[1]
Kiriakou’s solution was to make the accusation arrive as evidence rather than as allegation.
The forgery
He went to the prison law library, where by his second year he was spending nearly every day.[1] Searching the name, he found about 150 people who shared it — and among them a case from 1970s Ohio in which a man of the same name had beaten and raped a male prison guard.[2]
Kiriakou printed it, carefully cut out paragraphs, and over the following days assembled what looked like legitimate court papers: a document asserting that this Bob Jones had committed the Ohio offence in the seventies and had continued a life of crime, turning to methamphetamine in the nineties, being arrested, turning to it again and being arrested a third time — all presented as a continuation of a criminal career that began with the rape of a male prison guard.[2][3]
Delivery
He took it to the shot callers, saying he had received a tip that there was more to the man than met the eye, that he had checked it out, and that this was what was sitting on the prison law library computer system.[3]
The two white shot callers debated it briefly. One questioned whether the man was old enough to have done it in the seventies — he would have been about twenty. The other was certain, and framed the charge in the terms that mattered to them: not a pedophile but a homosexual, and they could not have that at the Aryan table without becoming laughing stocks.[3][4]
They banished him to the pedophile and rat table, which Kiriakou observes was also, presumably, the gay table.[4]
Aftermath
Kiriakou says the man had no idea what had happened to him or what had befallen him, and gives his own reasoning: he had to silence the man before the man did him real damage. His stated lesson is that the power of rumours is very, very strong.[4]
He generalises it further. One of the things he says he learned within his first few days in prison was that information is the most important currency there is — that knowing what is really going on bestows power. Information, he says, was far more important than mackerel and stamps: those might get a man a seat at the poker table or an extra set of underwear, but information gave power.[5]